Bingo Drag
By Paula Span
Washington Post Staff Writer
Contributed by Hebe Dotson and Andee W
New York
September 8, 1998
Remember that kiddie ditty about the
farmer who had a dog? "B-I-N-G-O! B-I-N-G-O!
B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was its name-o" -- that
one?
Four Certifiably Hip Young Persons were singing
it, loudly, and clapping along from their booth
at a downtown nightspot called Tortilla Flats
the other evening. Which was not as peculiar as
one might think: It was Bingo Night and the
anticipation was building.
In a nightlife trendlet that could confer
instant voguishness on millions of grandmas in
church basements across America, several
Manhattan bars and eateries are drawing crowds
with a pastime even more retro than
martini-drinking or swing-dancing.
Gotham being what it is, some of the folks
cranking the cage of bingo balls and calling
the numbers are drag queens. "People are tired
of the everyday -- this is different," explains
Bobsie Colon, manager of the Greenwich Village
cafe called Lips (as if being served drinks by
linebackers in minidresses weren't different
enough). Nevertheless, it's recognizably the
same game. B-3. N-36. "It's the bingo revival,"
Richard Feuring, an investment banker and grad
student, explained gravely while waiting for
the cards to be passed out at Tortilla Flats.
"We like audience participation," added his pal
Katie Massa, a 24-year-old temp and aspiring
comic. "And we heard that they had velvet Elvis
paintings here." True -- one depicting the
jeweled-jumpsuit-era King was peering over her
shoulder.
Tortilla Flats, where the burrito platters come
with a side of irony (and the "bingomeisters"
avoid wigs and stilettos), has been hosting
Monday night bingothons for years. But the
current fad, to the extent such things can be
tracked, seems to have arisen at the historic
Village watering hole called Stonewall, where a
police bust in 1969 detonated the gay rights
movement.
Kenny Dash, the "comic female impersonator"
(his preferred job description) who presides,
was casting about for some novelty to help the
bar pull in patrons on somnolent Mondays. "Drag
as an act was tired, played out. I felt like
the Titanic going down," he recalls with
typical understatement. "I couldn't come up
with a mousetrap they hadn't seen, but I could
find a mousetrap they hadn't thought about in a
while."
Even Dash, who now calls bingo numbers until 4
a.m., has been surprised to see patronage
triple. "In a city that's so culturally and
economically and cerebrally advanced, never did
I think something so sedate would attract
people," he says.
But customers not only sing along to his
classic disco tapes, answer trivia questions
and applaud his stories (there was that time
his car broke down on the Triborough Bridge and
he used his pantyhose as an alternator belt),
they help cater. "Everyone walks in with stuff
wrapped up in aluminum foil," Dash reports.
"Platters of homemade cupcakes! Cookies! One
guy brings 60 White Castle burgers and the
waiters pass them around."
Next on the bingo bandwagon was Lips, with a
Wednesday night variation. Hostesses Yvon Lame
and Sherry Vine call the numbers while genially
trashing each other's appearance ("I never get
tired of seeing that wig!"), social lives
("What's the difference between Yvon Lame and
garbage? Garbage gets picked up once in a
while") and joke-telling skills.
"Wait for the laughter to subside," says
Sherry, when no one's even chuckling at one of
Yvon's grosser lines.
"If you don't like it, go see the [expletive]
'Lion King,' " Yvon retorts. "O-66!"
This summer, bingo moved uptown to a bar called
The Works on the Upper West Side, where the
gimmick is a new theme each Tuesday. At Studio
54 Bingo, mirrored disco balls made the cards a
trifle hard to read. Flintstones Bingo featured
the drag-diva hostess and her sidekick as Betty
and Wilma. The prizes, as at the other spots,
tend toward the cheesy -- CDs, hats, T-shirts,
free drinks -- but that's not why people play.
Which raises the inescapable question: One
could argue that the, um, bingo revival bears
some relationship to urban anomie. "It's an
icebreaker," theorizes The Works' manager,
Daniel Lake. "You're not just standing around
afraid to talk to someone, or waiting for
someone to talk to you." One could spin
hypotheses about the hunger for simpler
pleasures in a technologically armored age.
One could, more simply, heed the wisdom of Bob
Strickland, a Manhattan ad exec and the proud
recipient of the Big Bingo Winner T-shirt at
Tortilla Flats last week: "Kind of gives you
something to do during lulls in the
conversation."
The Tortilla Flats game can be intense. "It
gets more competitive as people get more . . .
invigorated," says bingomeister John Barry,
delicately referring to the effects of
margarita consumption. There are shrieks of joy
for I-24, hisses from Katie Massa and company
for B-2. At one point, a hapless player at a
tableful of Morgan Stanley bankers claims to
have bingo but doesn't, thus disqualifying his
entire party and provoking chants of
"Don-is-dumb. Don-is-dumb."
Tsk, tsk. Massa's friend Alice Muir, an NYU
grad student, was only one square away from
victory, but no one hears her squawking. "It's
not whether you win or lose," she lectures
primly. "It's how you play the game."
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